In “Spent,” the protagonist looks like Alison Bechdel and quacks (well, bleats) like Alison Bechdel but the subtitle “A Comic Novel” is a clue that she’s not Alison Bechdel.
The writer/cartoonist has written three graphic memoirs, including the groundbreaking “Fun Home,” but “Spent” is something different. It brings back characters from the comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” which Bechdel originated when she lived in Minneapolis in the early 1980s. Those characters now live in a sort of commune in Vermont and are friends with a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel and her wife, Holly Rae Taylor, who run a pygmy goat refuge.
Bechdel and Taylor do live in Vermont; they are real. The goats are not. I found myself needing to get past a mildly annoying coyness that comes with the what-is-real-and-what-isn’t territory, particularly because much of the book features Alison slamming the TV adaptation of her previous memoir about her father and his taxidermy practice (“Fun Home” is about her father and his funeral home and it was adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical, not a TV series).
Do those complaints mean Bechdel doesn’t like the “Fun Home” musical, which she has previously complimented? Probably not, but it’s hard to be sure when you’re gazing at a character who looks exactly like Bechdel, making those complaints. It also isn’t a great look for someone who won a $625,000 MacArthur “genius” grant a decade ago to spend so much of the book whining about money.
Others who don’t love the “Fun Home” musical as much as I do will probably have an easier time letting go of that stuff. Bechdel wants us to get comfortable in a space that feels real even if it isn’t, so she can share her concerns about being part of a capitalist economy, doing business with soulless corporations and her sister writing a memoir that contradicts her own (to keep my carping consistent: Bechdel does not have a sister).
What makes that easy is that “Spent” is very funny and very self-deprecating. Bechdel writes wryly about her own inconsistencies as well as the goofy mistakes her “Spent” friends make as they try to become internet-famous, dabble with polyamory and parry with Hollywood executives who don’t understand them. There’s something charming and funny on practically every page of “Spent” and there’s at least one image — of a bermuda-shorts-and-clogs-clad Alison mowing the yard with a pygmy goat in a BabyBjörn on her chest — that made me laugh out loud.
You don’t have to have dived into meat substitutes and cruelty-free sex toys as deeply as the characters in “Spent” do in order to relate to their well-meaning confusion. Even as they make mistakes and screw things up, they’re easy to embrace because they’re trying so hard to be good people and to create a community that feels safe.
By the end, even this crank knew that whether “Spent” is a novel or a memoir-ish doesn’t matter. Fictitious or not, the characters face problems that are very real.
